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Jacksonville Jaguars first round draft pick Blake Bortles, center, talks to the media with head coach Gus Bradley, left, and general manager Dave Caldwell during an NFL football news conference Friday at EverBank Field in Jacksonville.

As NFL draft day arrived, Jaguars general manager Dave Caldwell took satisfaction that his desire to select quarterback Blake Bortles was kept secret. Better yet, he didn’t have to be put in the awkward position of lying.

Then on Thursday around noon, Daniel Jeremiah of the NFL Network called to pick Caldwell’s brain about the background of top prospects and a possible fit for the Jaguars. They went through Jadeveon Clowney, Khalil Mack, Sammy Watkins, Johnny Manziel. Then Jeremiah wanted to know about quarterbacks Derek Carr and Bortles.

Uh-oh! Caldwell was in a bind because Jeremiah, a former NFL scouting colleague, was someone he considered a personal friend. Not wanting to tip his hand on Bortles, the GM ended the conversation by telling Jeremiah he had to take a phone call.

A sheepish look went across Caldwell’s face Friday when I asked him about that exchange.

“There was no phone call,” Caldwell admitted. “I didn’t want to lie to him [about Bortles].”

While the debate rages on about whether the Jaguars made the right call in selecting Bortles, there’s no doubt the organization did a superb job concealing the extent of its love for the University of Central Florida quarterback. It’s not that so-called draft experts thought the Jaguars had zero interest in Bortles, but few saw them using the No. 3 overall pick to land him.

Though Caldwell prefers transparency in his media dealings, the draft is also a poker game. Nowhere is secrecy more critical than when it comes to a team’s true intentions on a highly regarded quarterback.

Caldwell didn’t want to be a full-blown con artist, but a little subterfuge along the way is sometimes necessary.

In a pre-draft luncheon with the media, Caldwell skillfully added to the growing speculation that the top quarterback prospects might not be worth a top-10 pick. By saying Manziel was the most NFL-ready of the bunch, he accomplished two things without lying: It created an impression the Jaguars might like him best and kept hidden that the GM coveted Bortles.

“[Secrecy] was Dave’s plan from the start,” Jaguars coach Gus Bradley said. “Dave and I had multiple conversations about quarterback. As we gravitated more and more towards [Bortles], we had that plan. We wanted to keep it under wraps in case someone wanted to trade up. There were two teams ahead of us [Houston Texans, St. Louis Rams] willing to trade.”

It wasn’t just secrecy from other NFL teams or the media, but Caldwell also wanted confidentiality within his own building. He purposely never let on to scouts or coaches how much he liked Bortles after first watching tape of him in the Penn State game. Following the Jaguars’ visit with the UCF star at the NFL combine in February, he avoided divulging his thoughts to anyone in personnel or the assistant coaches.

“That’s why I held my own opinion away,” Caldwell said. “Subconsciously, you can be influenced. I didn’t want to influence anybody. That can snowball. Then all of a sudden, you’re evaluating in a bubble, and you don’t want that.”

One thing that helped to keep the Jaguars coveting Bortles from getting out was in the team’s position-by-position evaluations, quarterback didn’t come up for discussion until the last week of April. Before then, offensive coordinator Jedd Fisch, quarterback coach Frank Scelfo and all the scouts had no idea where he fell on each other’s quarterback pecking order.

Now Fisch admits he picked up some subtle hints in traveling with Caldwell and Bradley to quarterback pro days, but nothing crystallized on Bortles until recently.

“The last week or two leading up to the draft, going through the different offensive players, we kept coming back to [Bortles],” Fisch said. “You sense everybody is beginning to feel that.”

But in the NFL world, front offices go to great lengths to be secretive about the draft. Even Jaguars owner Shad Khan had no idea Bortles was being targeted with the No. 3 pick until Tuesday night. He approved of the independent evaluations, with everyone collaborating later on a consensus.

“The process has to be inclusive,” Khan said. “We’ve got all these scouts, the personnel department, the coaches, and the leadership of Gus and Dave. It shouldn’t be impetuous. Two years ago, I saw how we drafted. It can’t be one person from the gut picking. And you can’t have cross-pollution up to a certain point.

“So let the people evaluate [prospects] independently. [Bradley and Caldwell] were just as dumbfounded as anybody on what a real strong consensus there was about Blake.”

Khan said he made no attempt to influence the first-round draft selection, saying: “I’m going to trust their instinct and go with that.” When asked if he had any inkling to steer the Jaguars to draft Manziel to help from a marketing standpoint, he replied: “No. Eventually, good football teams [make a team marketable].”

Nobody hated being kept out of the loop more than Bortles, who had no inkling until Caldwell called him a minute before the selection that the Jaguars were picking him. “Nothing at all,” said Bortles.

When Commissioner Roger Goodell announced Bortles’ selection, there was a definitive buzz about him being the first quarterback off the board. Mostly, pundits marveled at the element of surprise. Few of them saw the Jaguars pulling the trigger on Bortles with the third pick.

That’s a credit to the poker-faced Caldwell and the Jaguars for not tipping their hand.